Missing HERO Reports

Back in 1987 I did a DTIC search for HERO reports (DTIC is the defense library of reports, HERO was Trevor Dupuy’s old company(s) that produced around 130 or so reports). My DTIC search ended up finding something like 40% of HERO reports in their files. As almost of all these reports were done under contract for the government, then the figure should have been something more like 100%.

Now, I guess if I was a responsible citizen, I would have made sure that all the missing reports were identified, copies made, and they were then sent to DTIC. I did not do this, because as I busy running a large project that was behind schedule and over budget (the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base).

But……this little survey got my attention concerning what was preserved in the national report library (like NTIS…National Technical Information Center) and what was not. It raises the question as to whether we are properly preserving the studies and results of all this analysis that various companies have done….or are we loosing some of it. Unfortunately, I have found enough cases over the years of significant and important studies and files disappearing or becoming difficult to find….that I have become concerned. Whether this is indicative of a larger problem I will leave to the reader to determine, but there will be a few blog posts about this subject or the next week or two.

All of our reports and studies are listed on our website here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipubs.htm

It is some 130 HERO reports and 80 TDI reports.

It would be possible to someone to search the NTIS site and see how many these reports can be found (and which ones they cannot find). I would be interested in knowing the results of that if anyone wants to spend a few days doing this. If the problem exists for HERO and TDI reports…then it probably exists for work done by a lot of other companies also.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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